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At the recent National Book Awards ceremony, T.J. Stiles was presented the nonfiction award for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In his acceptance speech, he graciously thanked the people at his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, who supported the book, including editorial assistants, copy editors and marketing staffers. Always nice when people behind the scenes get some credit at a ceremony like this, in addition to just the lead editor or agent. But then Stiles said something that struck me as odd.

“The advent of the e-book is fooling people into thinking that none of these people are necessary anymore,” Mr. Stiles said. “If they cease to exist, the books will only be worth the paper they are not printed on.”

I shudder to think what would happen if eBooks eliminated the entry-level publishing jobs that provide two very important services to this country: making books legible and gainfully employing the liberal arts majors who graduate from east coast colleges each year. I completely agree that we need well-educated, under-paid, highly ambitious young people to fact check, organize footnotes, sprinkle punctuation throughout, arrange cover art and manage book tours. I don’t agree that eBooks are making these jobs obsolete, or that anyone believes they should be. That last turn of phrase “the books will only be worth the paper they are not printed on” is quite nice though.

Stiles may be referring to the growing self-publishing industry, which is certainly facilitated by the rise of digital media. If you can’t break into publishing through traditional channels, there are plenty of options now for you to publish your own book, hawk it on Amazon, and wait for sales. As writer Maya Rudolph explains, however, self-publishing is not for everyone, or perhaps even for many.

It’s true that technology is enabling a rapid democratization of the culture-producing process: you can publish your own books, write a blog about eReaders, record and sell your own music, and post videos of you singing, dancing, or doing absolutely nothing. As a result there is a glut of really bad content. That’s an understatement. But there are the occasional gems, buried beneath the dreck. I’d like to think that we will get to a point where it becomes easier to find good content, and that there will always be a role for editors — and their assistants — to provide quality control. Now I’m off to download The First Tycoon. If I find a typo, I will take a photo of it, print it out, and mail it to T.J. Stiles.

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, is a collection of short stories about the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine, loosely tied together through their association with Olive Kitteridge, the title character and former high school math teacher. I started reading it after book club last week because one of the members recommended it highly. I downloaded it without reading reviews first, and shortly afterward received this email from my husband who noticed the book on our joint Kindle account: Nice pick, Happy McCheery!

I’m not writing a review of the book because even though it’s beautiful in the way that Art can illuminate The Human Experience, it’s still depressing and I don’t feel like paging through it again. Dysfunctional does not begin to describe the relationships in this town, and its inhabitants suffer from a seemingly endless run of bad luck, tragedy, and heartbreak.

However, Olive Kitteridge did bring to mind two other books, one very similar in structure and theme and the other completely different but highly relevant. First, Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, which I first read in high school. Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio also takes the form a series of interconnected short stories about the residents of a small town, this one in the Midwest. That the characters, who are recalled by an old writer in the prologue, are summed up as “grotesques” should tell you something. When I finished Olive Kitteridge, I downloaded Winesburg to read it again. Winesburg and Olive center on the effort, a century apart, by characters in small-town America to understand a rapidly changing world and the pain of surviving, let alone thriving, in isolation from the world around you.

And that brings me to the other book I read recently, the funny yet thoughtful and informative The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. Weiner, a self-professed unhappy man and foreign correspondent for NPR, recounts his attempt to understand happiness by going where people are quantifiably happier (yes, there is a Happiness Index): Switzerland, Iceland, Qatar, India, Thailand, and Bhutan. He also spends time in Moldova and a small town outside London where the original version of The Office was set. In the end, what makes people happy, he concludes after consulting ancient philosophers, modern-day gurus and happiness scientists, are relationships. No wonder the grotesques of Crosby and Winesburg didn’t stand a chance.

A stunning display of the latest in video and brochure folding technology

Okay, so the TV is old and boxy, the wire visible and trailing off the table, and its only resemblance to the “stunning” retail displays promised at launch is that it is set up inside a Barnes & Noble. But it means, I believe, that my local B&N ranks as a high-volume store, so it should have demo units by the end of the month. In fact, and this is now the third time I’ve checked, the clerk last week told me to come back on November 20 to test drive. And then she offered to turn on the video, which I regretted, because then I was stuck there watching the most boring product video ever. If you thought the Kindle ads were blah, go into your nearest B&N and watch the nook infomercial. Midwestern-bred politeness kept me from leaving until she bent down behind the counter to shelve some books, and then I made my escape.

Given what I’ve learned about the nook’s sharing feature, however, I am glad I didn’t bother to go ahead and pre-order the nook sight unseen. A MobileRead member pressed B&N’s online support for details on the sharing feature, and found out that you can only loan a nook book out once (via Kindlerama). While your book is out on loan, you can’t read it; the borrower has 14 days to read it, after which it’s removed from her B&N reader device, and sharing is disabled from that title in your collection. Forever.

Calling this experience “sharing” seems overly generous. “Limited one-time lending” might be more accurate. The worst part in my opinion isn’t the 14-day limit, which, benevolently interpreted, could be Barnes & Noble’s way of encouraging us to become faster readers. It’s that once you lend a book to someone, you can never share it with anyone again. Imagine you are the owner of a nook and you buy a highly-anticipated book, say Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. Your friends beg you to share it with them. Do you play favorites? Send it to the most politically conservative one of the bunch because the views expressed will validate her own, or pick the one who can’t wait to rip it apart for her liberal Facebook friends?

I understand publishers are worried about the sales cannibalization that would occur if nookers were to endlessly recycle their eBooks among friends. But if you assume the worst in everyone and establish business practices accordingly, you end up with senseless policies that ultimately harm your relationships with your customers. There’s little real risk in nook owners starting a book-lending racket. People who want to read a book will not wait for months while everyone else ahead of them on the list gets a chance to read it first. Or if they do, they’ll spend that time stewing about why they’re not higher on the list and eventually refuse the loan anyway out of spite. And realistically, who is going to keep asking a nook-owning friend to share books with him? At some point, that friend is going to get fed up and tell him to buy the books himself or go to the library like the rest of us.

As of Thursday, November 5, the Top 5 books on the Kindle Store Bestsellers List are:

1. By Reason of Insanity, by Randy Singer
2. Fireflies in December by Jennifer Erin Valent
3. A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton
4. Bound for the Holidays (Ties That Bind book 1) by Mackenzie McKade
5. The Hunters by Jason Pinter

I’ve never heard of any of these authors, so I thought I would take a closer look at what’s driving them to the top of the list. They’re free, for starters, as are all but one book in the Top 10 — Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Given the appeal of a freebie, even — or perhaps especially — to people who have shelled out several hundred dollars for a Kindle, it’s not surprising that the most popular books are the ones that are given away. Sean Ryan at SharkJumping lays out the case for a separate Free vs. Paid Kindle Bestseller List, and suggests reasons why publishers would want to give away content.

But what’s the old adage? You can lead a horse to water… Just because a publisher offers something for free doesn’t explain why these particular books made it to the top of the list and into the laps of thousands of Kindle owners. There are 20,000 free books available through the Kindle Store or through Project Gutenberg and other sites that have digitized public domain books. Only 5 of the free classics even make it into the Kindle Top 50: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Pride and Prejudice, The Prince, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and A Christmas Carol.

Of the current Top 5, two are thrillers and two are erotica, making for an unusually high percentage of pulp fiction on the Kindle bestseller list. You can go down any supermarket aisle (or Barnes & Noble, for that matter) and find rows of crime thrillers and mysteries, which also seem to dominate airport bookstores. You don’t typically see erotic fiction dominating book displays, however, at least not in mainstream bookstores. A Kiss of Shadows is about faeries and in the words of Publishers Weekly, “blends supernatural fantasy with detective adventure and hot sex.” Bound for the Holidays is a fantasy of a different sort, about an employee who goes home with the hot CEO after the office holiday party only to find out that his best friend — a cowboy, no less — has shown up and expects to get in on the action as he usually does.

The Kindle does for erotica what the paper bag does for a 40 of O.E.: provide a respectable cover. Kindle owners are free to download anything, regardless of what’s depicted on the cover, and read even the sexiest office romp in, well, the office, with no one the wiser. Although I must warn that if you share a Kindle account with your spouse, as I do, you may get an incriminating email receipt forwarded to you. The Internet, depending on your perspective, has been the best or worst thing to happen to porn since VHS. Given the appeal of anonymity and quantity of free content, the Kindle might do the same for soft core fiction.

Last night I noticed that The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy, which my husband pre-ordered, was already in the archived section of my iPhone Kindle app. Since I had already finished my book club selection for the month and hadn’t decided what to read next, I opened up The Book of Basketball.

I’m married to a subscriber of the print edition of ESPN The Magazine, so I’ve read Bill Simmons columns in the past and found them amusing, if a little heavy on the pop culture references. So while I’ll read a sports article here and there, a book fully dedicated to sports would not make it to my nightstand. And this one is 700 pages, a fact that I fortunately did not realize when I started reading, due to the Kindle’s use of locations rather than pages. The Book of Basketball is surprisingly good though, at least so far. I’m still on Chapter One the Prologue (I need chapter indicators on the screen!), where he recounts attending Celtics games as a 5-year-old with his dad. (I had to laugh at his racial identity crisis — he used to want to be called Jabaal Abdul-Simmons — because our 5-year-old son has told me that he wants “a brown face like Kobe,” and doesn’t understand why we can’t just go buy him one for Christmas.)

I enjoy watching basketball, but I’m no NBA history buff, so interspersing Simmons’ personal history with that of the league makes it an interesting read without getting so overloaded with trivia that I shut down. Normally if I read a sports magazine or blog, I read the backstory-type articles and skim game recaps. But Simmons’ account of Game 5 of the 1976 Finals between the Celtics and the Suns, most of which he slept through because it started at 9pm EST and he was just a kid, actually kept me engrossed. Here’s an excerpt starting after the dramatic finish of the second overtime:

You know the rest: the officials ruled that one second remained, referee Richie Powers got attacked by a drunken fan, the Suns called an illegal time-out to get the ball at midcourt, Jo Jo drained the technical free throw, Gar Heard made the improbable turnaround to force a third OT (I remember thinking it was a 50-footer at the time), then the Celtics narrowly escaped because of the late-game heroics of Jo Jo and an unassuming bench player named Glenn McDonald.

I don’t recognize any of the names in this sentence (like Simmons, I was five years old that year but didn’t watch the game let alone have seats a few rows behind the visitors bench) but I still want to track down a video of the game, which is a first for me.

My other response to the first few pages of The Book of Basketball is to think of Simmons in terms of The New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. Most American males would agree that Simmons has the best job in the world, and even Gladwell calls him a “lucky bastard.” Simmons started his career as a sports fan while still a pre-schooler. And he didn’t just watch the big games on TV while wandering through the living room with legos or Star Wars action figures in hand. Because the Celtics by 1978 had “devolved into one of the league’s most hapless teams,” ticket prices dropped and his dad was able to buy a second season ticket for young Bill, plus their seats got upgraded to the aisle near the tunnel used by the players to access the locker rooms.

So by the time Simmons reached adulthood, he undoubtedly would have logged the 10,000 hours of viewing, cheering, game analysis, season previews, and fantasy league management required per Gladwell’s thesis to become a true expert — in this case a sports fan to top all other sports fans. Furthermore, he was presented with opportunities (I’m assuming there will be more, since I haven’t even cracked Chapter One yet) like the affordable season tickets and the prime viewing spot that gave him a chance to interact with some players. Gladwell, by the way, wrote the foreword to The Book of Basketball where he makes the case for Simmons’ depth of basketball knowledge. Mere coincidence? Gladwell’s own stories of success would say not.

I just finished reading Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie on the Kindle and iPhone. It’s a quick read (two late nights) and utterly delightful, if that’s an appropriate way to describe a detective novel. Set in 1950’s England, Flavia de Luce, the 11-year-old heroine, uses her wits and astonishing knowledge of chemistry to solve a murder on the grounds of her family’s crumbling estate, Buckshaw. The plot twists were pretty easy to figure out; I was about a chapter ahead of Flavia on every major development, but then again she’s eleven years old. Still, the novel was completely engrossing and there was plenty of suspense in watching Flavia take on all of the adults, well-meaning or not, around her.

I wish I could read Sweetness to my three-year-old daughter as an antidote for Barbie & The Diamond Castle, a book with a drawing of what appears to be Paris and Nicky Hilton look-alikes holding puppies on the cover. My daughter spotted the book at the library on Monday and picked it up immediately. I agreed to check it out because really, what harm can there be in letting a child read about princesses on occasion? When I was seven years old, I’d check out an entire shelf of fairy tales from the library at a time, and expanded my interest from fairy tales to mythology and history. So on Monday I put the Barbie princess book in the bag and checked out the Brothers Grimm version of The Twelve Dancing Princesses to provide some balance in fairytale reporting.

Barbie & The Diamond Castle adopts some familiar fairy tale tropes, including a mysterious old woman who gives them an enchanted object — a mirror, of course. What’s funny is when they throw in some new ones, like puppies, which the girls find and adopt on their way to said castle to break a spell. If you’re ever going on an adventure to foil a wicked Muse, a puppy is sure to come in handy. Along the way, they get rescued by a pair of cute singing Jonas twins and then rest at a manor. This is where I put the book down — “They find food to eat and they try on gowns.” Gowns. The girls have their very own Pretty Woman moment at some strange manor where there are unattended dresses that happen to fit them. At the risk of giving away the plot, in the end the girls become princesses and “their gowns sparkle.” One wonders what non-lethal but cosmetically damaging concoction Flavia would brew for these two.

The contrast between Flavia and Barbie (who is a brand, not a character, in her books) highlighted for me the need to do more due diligence on the children’s books, specifically those for girls, that I bring home. I’ll start with a list from the San Francisco Public Library and throw in two of my childhood pals, Pippi Longstocking and Ramona. I’m not opposed to all books that feature girls dressing up, playing princess, etc. I love the Fancy Nancy series, for example. But my daughter needs a balanced diet in books as well as food, and at this point could use more Flave than fluff.

I may have to wait longer to buy a nook at my local Barnes & Noble after all. B&N spokesperson Mary Ellen Keating in an email to paidContent.org:

While it’s always difficult to predict demand on a new product, and early from response from consumers is strong, Barnes & Noble expects to have nook eBook readers in stock in the majority of its stores by the peak holiday season and plans to have nook devices in stock in all of its stores by early next year.

The company does promise to put at least one demo device in each store by November 30 (not November 20 as the clerk in my branch store told me) so that you can test it in person, but if it’s not a high-volume store, don’t expect “stunning” displays. Oh, and you’ll have to order it online — much like an out-of-stock book. Ah, commerce in the digital age… it moves at the speed of light!

The wonderful thing about sharing a Kindle with your spouse is that you can see where your tastes in books overlap (Malcolm Gladwell) and diverge (anything to do with sports or Jane Austen), without ever having to argue about whose books should be banished to the bottom shelf in the office. There are 52 items on our Kindle, 25 of which are free samples. Of the 27 complete books listed, I downloaded six. Remove the three items that come pre-loaded on the Kindle, and that means my husband Jason has downloaded 19 books since May, or almost the rate of one per week. I’ve read five or six of his selections. So in this period, he has read about 20 books on the Kindle, and I’ve read 11 eBooks and probably another five paper books. He still has me beat, which leads me to a couple of observations.

First, Jason is much more apt to download samples and then purchase the books he likes. I’m less decisive. I tend to read what comes across my desk/Kindle/iPhone, similar to how I browse a friend’s bookshelf when I happen to visit and then borrow one or two novels to read at home. It takes me a while to commit to buying a book, regardless of format. Pre-Kindle, I would buy in the airports or for book club. Beyond that, I would either have to love the author’s work already, or I’d spend a ridiculous amount of time paging through a copy at the store. But now, because Jason is quick to download books, I feel like I should give them a read before bothering to buy any more. There are plenty of titles that I will skip altogether, but I generally trust his judgment, even if the overlapping section of our Venn diagram of literary preferences is more sunflower than pumpkin seed in shape.

Also, I’m prone to judging a book by its cover. Literally. In a bookstore, I get sucked in by the books on display at the front of the store. Even when I’m looking for children’s books at the library, I’ll pick the ones from the wall that have good illustrations on the jackets. (If I’m alone, I’ll take the time to search for particular authors, but with kids in tow, expediency trumps selectiveness.) Having switched to eBooks, I don’t get prompted by bookstore or library table displays to pick up the latest novel, and I haven’t started reading The New York Review of Books online yet because I barely have time to read the books that we already own (rent?).

Sharing a Kindle account, though, has its downsides. We both have iPhones where we now do most of our reading, and because I at least check out a lot of Jason’s recommendations, we’re often reading the same book at the same time. Every time I open up the Kindle app, I’m asked if I want to sync to the furthest location, which is not mine. Not a problem as long as I stick to the iPhone. When I try to switch back to the Kindle, I can’t sync to my phone, so unless I want to page ahead manually at a deathly slow pace that still manages to aggravate my tendonitis, I’m better off just reading on the phone. One thing that would help is if at the bottom or top of each screen, it indicated the current chapter, so that skipping ahead by chapter from the table of contents didn’t require a guessing game.

I know that I could set up my own Kindle account for my phone, and then we wouldn’t get the conflicting location messages. But we also wouldn’t get to share books easily AND switch between devices — yes, I want it all. I’d have to switch back to the Kindle to read something at the same time that he was, and wouldn’t be able to continue on the phone while waiting in the line at Safeway for the woman in front of me to decide whether or not she wanted that package of full-price ground beef after all. I imagine that I’ll probably get a nook in my stocking this year. And then we’ll have two entirely different systems of reading. Good for this blog, and I’ll take more ownership of my reading list — I will download everything on the Booker shortlist, darn it! But I’ll be a little bit nostalgic too, for the good old days of sharing a Kindle account. It’s kind of like when couples go from sharing a car, suffering the inconvenience of waiting for a ride or schlepping across town to pick up the spouse, to having his and her cars and all of the speed and satisfaction of determining one’s own destiny even if it’s just the best route to take in traffic, and then realizing they kind of miss cruising down the HOV lane together, venting about their day.

In the past, we didn’t share books all that often, but now we discuss what we’re reading pretty regularly, a welcome addition to the short list of Stuff to Talk About Other Than Kids and Work and Mad Men. The lending feature might be reason enough to pre-order the nook. It seems to give us the best of both worlds: a way to share books with each other and read them at the same time… up to two weeks.

In my excitement about the nook (other than the name), I somehow missed out on the news that Tuesday’s announcement was a soft launch. I stopped by Barnes & Noble this morning, figuring I’d get to check out the nook in person. I expected to see huge window banners announcing the arrival of the nook, but was surprised instead to see… nothing, except a large poster advertising Dog Days (Diary of a Wimpy Kid).

There was a smaller sign on one of the doors that said free WiFi was now available in the store. That’s good, I thought, they’re getting ready for nookmania (my term – call me, B&N). But inside, it looked like every other day at Barnes & Noble. No one greeted me with a “Would you like to try out the nook?” No 8-foot displays with brochures or promotional book marks featuring what should be Barnes & Noble’s biggest. launch. ever.

Hmmm, that’s odd, I thought. Perhaps the absence of hoopla was merely the result of understaffing. I saw the back of someone’s curly head behind the information desk, but there were three people waiting already. Finally I spotted a cashier before she disappeared behind a large reading glasses display. I sprinted over to her. “Can I see a nook?” I asked breathlessly. She shook her head. “It’s not available until November 20th. The best way to get a nook is to go to the web site, bn.com, and you can place a pre-order for it.”

“But when can I see it in the store?”

“You should just go to the web site and learn about it there.” This time she handed me a small nook-sized booklet from a 15-inch display next to the register.

“So you’re never going to have them in the store?”

“Not until November 20th.”

Tell me how this makes sense. Even if it’s not available to purchase until late November, why not let people look at the nook in the store, turn it over, ooh and ah, and conveniently place a pre-order for it on the spot? I left feeling a little dejected, and even rejected, by Barnes & Noble’s lack of excitement. Quite likely, there aren’t enough units out of production to put one or two into hundreds of stores nationwide. I would have settled for a video though, or reviewed a comparison chart, and understood if she had said to come back on November 10 or 15 to get a live demo. By not putting the nook into their customers’ hands even for a few minutes — letting them see for themselves how the eInk is so easy on the eyes and cool, it works like an iPhone on the bottom — Barnes & Noble is wasting their single biggest advantage over Amazon: their big, boxy and very tangible stores.

Update: I called the store a few days later and asked again about the nook availability in-store. The cashier who told me November 20 was mistaken, and the promised in-store date is November 30, as confirmed by recent official comments by Barnes & Noble.

Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom, reason, weaving, and somehow both peace and war. She famously protected mythological heroes like Odysseus and Jason, and inspired the people of Athens to build the Parthenon. So if you heard that the Barnes and Noble’s new eReader was to be named Athena, as was presumed from some early photos (look at the upper right corner, in faint gray letters), you would likely nod absent-mindedly and think, yes, that makes sense. It doesn’t evoke books exactly, but the association with knowledge is appropriate. We’re good so far.

Ah, but it doesn’t rhyme with “Book.” And that is the reason why the new B&N eReader, due to be announced today, is called nook. Perhaps the name Athena can’t be trademarked, and the domain name is taken for some spreadsheet software. We’ll also throw into the Nook pros column that you could curl up with a book in a cozy nook. And it’s not a made up word like Vook (in my head I hear the robot in a kids video who’s learning to rhyme, saying mechanically: “Vook’s not okay? Why I say?”). But still. Bloggers heaped scorn upon Simon & Schuster’s vooks. Did no one at Barnes & Noble notice?

Naming mis-conventions aside, the B&N reader does look cool with its dual eInk and touchpad LCD screens. And you can share books with friends for up to 14 days. With a price point of $259, I don’t see the nook pulling enough new buyers to dislodge Kindle from its overwhelming market dominance. It does, however, merit a trip to the bookstore, which I haven’t visited since we got the Kindle months ago.